Julia McKelvey Dramatis Persona

Julia McKelvey, ISB’s Drama Coordinator, was born in Shropshire, UK, into a family of artists, and grew up in the grounds of Christ’s Hospital School, Horsham, where her father was Director of Music. The young Julia enjoyed a somewhat Ramsome-esque youth of scrumping apples and swimming in the pool when the schoolboys were at their studies. “I had a magical childhood:” she says, “ice-skating in winter and madrigals by the lake in summer.” Her large family house contained four pianos and always seemed to be filled with people (“especially when a football match was on!”)

Setting the scene

This nascent setting sowed the seed for Julia’s lifelong involvement with the Arts and, in particular, Theatre. By the tender age of six or seven, she and a friend had begun to write plays for Christmas celebrations and were busy persuading other staff children to be members of the cast. These plays became an annual event. “We would start writing the play in June, and hold rehearsals at my home,” she recalls. “And, all these years later, the school’s Christmas entertainment is still going strong.”

After attending a tiny Victorian primary school, Julia graduated to a nearby comprehensive school, where, not surprisingly, one of her favourite subjects was English. As a schoolgirl, she was involved in all the school plays; many of which, like a curate’s egg, could best be described as “good in parts.” (She recalls on occasion looking out from the stage towards the audience during a particularly “excruciating” production of Agamemnon, only to spot not merely one, but both parents, visibly yawning!) These early and somewhat capricious brushes with school theatricals clearly left Julia undaunted. In fact, she loved her student years, which perhaps is a reason why she has dedicated her career to the education profession: “I laughed my entire school life. I had the most fun and was constantly in a good mood!”

The international path

Julia achieved a degree in Liberal Arts at Leicester University before taking a post-graduate certificate of education in Exeter. After three years teaching in Somerset, she moved to Kuwait to teach English and Drama, thus taking her first steps along the path of international education. Over the next few years, she taught in several schools in the Middle East (she is still in touch today with many of the students she taught at this time) and was immersed in local activities, such as running a theatre group and writing pantomimes. She also taught in Japan and Tanzania before returning to the UK to take up the position of Head of English at the Southbank International School in London.

Around this time, Julia added to her professional qualifications that of being a primary music teacher. (As a child she had learned to play the piano and violin, and, in her adult years, became a self-taught cellist). The school at which she then worked was undergoing expansion; hence followed an intense period when she found herself teaching not only Diploma level English and co-ordinating the self-taught programme, but also all the primary school music and middle school drama – and all this commuting from Somerset and with a young family to support!

A privilege – and a responsibility

Being by this stage a devotee of international education, and also wishing her children to speak other languages as well as English, she worked for five years in the French-speaking part of Switzerland before making the move, approximately ten years ago, to International School Basel. From the first, one of Julia’s aims was to raise the profile of Drama within school. “Drama doesn’t just deal with pedagogical subject matter,” reflects Julia. “It covers all the things needed for a happy and successful life. It instils a sense of belonging and self-discipline, the knowledge that everyone has something to contribute.” She observes that students who have been involved with a school production—whether on- stage, back-stage, or both—“never, ever forget it.”

Passion…and pâtisserie

Not surprisingly, theatre, travel and music are potent, constant features of Julia’s life. She is also a trained cook (“I can do all the pastries”) and adept at various handicrafts (she recently made a fitted sofa-cover out of a pair of curtains!) Although describing herself as not particularly sporty, she enjoys walking the family dog, a Lakeland terrier called Oliver, and once completed the Basel Stadtlauf run, despite confessing that months of training did little to improve her performance. “When I set my goal at something, I’m very determined!”

As someone who has been involved in education her whole life, Julia is cognizant of the responsibility that being a drama teacher carries. She understands the creative synergy that is essential to successful explorations in theatre; also the sense of elation, quickly followed by the brief but intense feeling of mourning, which is so often experienced by cast and crew after the final curtain has fallen. Nurturing, supporting, sustaining, encouraging, inventing and reinventing –all these things naturally come with the territory. “I love my job,” she says.“What I really like is that it allows me to keep learning. The more I know, the more I realise I don’t.”